News

Professor Vicki H. Grassian has been selected to receive the 2018 Chemical Pioneer Award by the American Institute of Chemists (http://www.theaic.org/awards_chem_pioneer.html). The award started in 1966 for the purpose of recognizing chemists, chemical engineers or their associates who have made outstanding contributions which have had a major impact on advances in the chemical science and industry and/or the chemical profession. Past award recipients include several UC San Diego Professor Harold Urey who received the award in 1969. Professor Grassian has been selected for this award for her significant contributions to the area of heterogeneous atmospheric chemistry and the emerging area of the environmental and health effects of nanomaterials. Her award addressed entitled “The Physical Chemistry of Environmental Interfaces” will be presented at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia on May 10, 2018.
More Information...

Tezcan Lab creates a new form of material

All materials suffer from a fundamental limitation: If a substance is highly ordered, it tends to be inflexible and brittle. If it is highly flexible and adaptive, it tends to be disordered. Three graduate students in the Tezcan Lab, Ling Zhang, Jake Bailey and Rohit Subramanian, have circumvented this limitation by engineering a new material by integrating protein crystals with hydrogel polymers. These crystal-gel hybrids can reversibly expand by more than 500% in volume without losing crystalline order, resist fragmentation and self-heal efficiently, which conventional crystals are not capable of. The study is reported in the May 3rd issue of the journal Nature.
More Information...

Congratulations to the 2018 recipients of the Frieda Daum Urey Endowed Fellowship!

We proudly announce that Khin San from the Schimpf Lab and Jessie Moreton from the Cohen Lab have been awarded the 2018 Frieda Daum Urey Endowed Fellowship!

Prof. Wei Xiong and his group receive 2018 DoD DURIP Award

Prof. Wei Xiong and his group receive 2018 DoD Defense University Research Instrumentation Program (DURIP) Award. The Xiong group will develop a tabletop time-resolved soft x-ray spectrometer under the support of this award.
More Information...

Experiments and computation lead to the design & understanding of novel, responsive biomaterials

In a publication in Nature Chemistry, the collaborative team of the Tezcan Lab and Prof. Francesco Paesani report the first example of a synthetic protein assembly whose free energy landscape is fully mapped out by computation and experiment, and whose structural dynamics can be predictably engineered. To date, efforts in biomolecular design have overwhelmingly focused on obtaining inflexible architectures that assemble predominantly via high-affinity interactions into enthalpically favored structures. Led by Robert Alberstein, a graduate student in the Tezcan Lab, the team has now created 2D, porous protein lattices, whose dynamics are controlled by water entropy. Guided by computer simulations, the team has engineered the protein lattices to control their porosity in a predictable manner, which has important implications for applications in separation, filtration, sensing and catalysis.
More Information...

Professor Kristie Boering Elected to U.S. National Academy of Sciences

Professor Kristie Boering, a 1985 graduate from our Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, winner of the Harold C. Urey award for outstanding graduating senior was just elected to the U.S. National Academy. She did isotope research in Professor Thiemens group and received a PhD from Stanford University with Professor John Brauman. In her Post Doctoral research with Professor Steve Wofsy at Harvard she developed airborne and balloon instruments to study the global carbon cycle and flew missions around the world. She is presently a Professor at UC Berkeley in the Departments of Chemistry and Earth and Planetary Sciences with programs that isotopically study the nitrogen cycle, stratosphere-troposphere mixing, global change on long time scales and the earths and Titans early atmosphere using stable isotopes and global chemical modeling. Her work also includes basic photochemistry using crossed molecular beam and synchrotron UV light.
More Information...

Message from the Chair

Thank you for visiting the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. Ours is
a vibrant and dynamic Department that combines research on the most consequential and revelatory scientific
areas with education aimed at building our future leaders and informed citizens.

The research we engage in is marked by its breadth — from atomic to cellular, from origins of life to climate
change, from single molecules to systems level, from sustainable energy to cancer cures, from nanomaterials
to solar systems, from infectious diseases to semiconductors, from RNA splicing to condensed phases, from
protein structure to three-body problems, from lipid maps to stable carbenes, and so on. Along with these
areas, we also engage in understanding how best to communicate scientific knowledge to our students. All
these research efforts are made possible by the approximately $33M of sponsored research funds raised yearly
by our faculty, and the array of advanced technologies acquired by our faculty to probe ever deeper into
fundamental questions. Our faculty has been acknowledged for their creativity. We have Nobel Prize winners, members
of the National Academy of Sciences, and HHMI Investigators among others.

Research is but one facet of our efforts. The other central facet is teaching. In this, we seek not only
to convey the wisdom of ages but also the excitement of new scientific findings. The changes in our daily
lives that these discoveries are making are enormous, and the pace at which these discoveries are being
made is ever increasing. This means that one of our fundamental tasks is to help students understand what
lies at the forefront of knowledge, so that they can understand how best to address current and future
problems. We find the daily engagement with students to be energizing, and view scientific breakthroughs
to be on equal footing with those moments in which we are able to convey an idea so that a student “gets it.” We
teach 22,000 undergraduates and 2,000 graduate students in our courses. We have 1,000 undergraduate majors along
with 40 Masters and 200 PhD students, and we train more than 100 Postdoctoral Researchers.

The Department recognizes that science is carried out in a societal context, and values diversity, equity, and
inclusion among its faculty, researchers, and students. Indeed, our faculty is one of the most diverse among
Chemistry departments. However, we recognize much work remains to be done and we continue to work towards
increasing diversity throughout the Department.

I hope you will take some time to look around and learn about the superb research and teaching going on in
the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry.

The application of analytical chemistry to forensic, environmental and industrial chemistry, then bridge these experiences into the classroom. This also includes the role technology and instrumentation play in discovery and problem solving.